AMD Adds Low-Power Opteron Chips to Family.

On the sixth anniversary of AMD Opteron processor, Advanced Micro Devices unveiled quad-core central processing units for servers with power consumption trimmed to 40W. The new chips are the industry’s first quad-core microprocessors with 40W thermal envelope. AMD hopes that the new Opteron EE will become popular in power- and cooling-limited data-centers.

“Adding the 40W EE power band to the quad-core AMD Opteron line-up helps our customers achieve maximum value for their unique data center needs across the board. The EE processor is ideal for cloud computing environments, which demand both extreme energy efficiency and a balanced system that can handle high transactional demands,” said Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager of server and workstation business at AMD.

The new processors are quad-core AMD Opteron 2373 EE and 2377 EE models that operate at 2.10GHz and 2.30GHz, respectively, feature 2MB L2 cache (512KB per core), 6MB L3 cache, integrated dual-channel DDR2 memory controller and are made using 45nm SOI fabrication process. The new chips are compatible with socket F infrastructure.

According to AMD, the new quad-core AMD Opteron 2377 EE (2.30GHz) processor adds significant power efficiency improvements over the quad-core AMD Opteron 2381 HE (2.50GHz) processor within the same platform with a 13% reduction in platform-level power consumption and up to a 14% reduction in processor power at idle. At the same performance level, the new EE processor delivers up to 62% improved performance-per-watt over the previous generation.